Close Calls With Nonsense

Tomorrow night I’m talking in South Dakota. It will be my first visit to SD, and my first visit to Sioux City, Iowa, the airport close enough to Vermilion that it’s the first choice for Vermilion-bound flyers. I saw some, but not enough, of the far, non-metropolitan Midwest when we lived in the Twin Cities; and now I’ll see more. I’ll be reading and talking about contemporary poetry, but also giving a talk about science fiction!

My host there, Lee Ann Roripaugh, has a neat, haunting poem that retells the Lamia story, and its equivalent in Japanese legend, through the Lamia’s eyes– literally through her eyes. Turns out the poem is online. She also likes octopus. Me too.

In other “me! me!” news, I reviewed Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems for the SF Chronicle, and now I’m the review of the day at Powell’s; I’ve also got something on William Carlos Willams up at the Poetry Foundation, though when I look at it now I fear that the graf breaks are all wrong, and that all the wrongness is my own hastily-proofreading fault. Anyone else have that feeling when looking at published work?

In non-me news, the always-worth-checking-with Cold Front web-journal has a neat feature called “Poets Off Poetry”: here’s Mark Bibbins on shoegazing and related dreamy pop sounds, and Chris Martin introducing some indie hip-hop. Note the props given to Slug, of Minnesota’s own fine Atmosphere.